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Updated: May 12, 2025
So he went to M. Hachette with the following proposition: "I have a friend named Taine, who is very ill, and I want you to send him to the Pyrenees." "But, M. About, I don't know your friend, and why, in Heaven's name, should I send him to the Pyrenees?" "But he is a genius, he will be famous one day, and he will make your fortune. Your fortune is already made, I know, but he will increase it."
With Louise, she was leaving that evening, at four o'clock, for the East with the body of her husband. She could not go without seeing again the man whom, as Mr. Taine had rightly said, she loved loved with the only love of which because of her environment and life she was capable.
Their speeches were childish. ``Never a fact, says Taine, ``nothing but abstractions, strings of sentences about Nature, reason, the people, tyrants, liberty: like so many puffed-out balloons uselessly jostling in space.
Taine at the door, explained, doubtfully, that the artist was at his work. He would go tell Mr. King that Mrs. Taine was here. "Never mind, Kee. I will tell him myself," she answered; and, before the Chinaman could protest, she was on her way to the studio. "Damn!" said the Celestial eloquently; and retired to his kitchen to ruminate upon the ways of "Mellican women." Mrs.
"She is of mingled French and Dutch blood. She was a Miss Du Taine. Her father was a member of the Volksraad at Pretoria. He controls large interests on the Rand, and has an estate near Johannesburg. She is married to an English gentleman. He is very rich, and has a title. She told it me, but I have forgotten it. She asked me to drive home and lunch with her...." She hesitated.
"One may say of him what Taine said of Balzac: 'A sort of literary elephant, capable of bearing prodigious burdens, but heavy-footed. And in fact ... he reveals a great resemblance to Balzac, a relative Balzac, for the exclusive use of a people, but a Balzac none the less."
We may admit that all five of the authors designated by Lowell are truly indispensable, just as we must accept also the incomparable position of the four leaders in the several arts whom Taine set apart in lonely elevation. But both Taine's list and Lowell's we feel to be too brief.
There, in the Viking age, the English sweep the seas, great burly brutes, as Taine shows them to us, gorging on half-raw meat, swilling huge draughts of ale, lounging naked by the sedgy brooks under the mist-softened sun that cannot brown their fair pink bodies, until hunger drives them forth to foray; drinking and fighting and feasting and shouting and loving as Odin loved Frega.
Peering into the laughing, chattering, glittering, throng he added, "Some beauties here to-night, heh? Gad! my boy, but I've seen the day I'd be out there among them! Ha, ha! Mrs. Taine, Louise, and Jim tried to shelve me but I fooled 'em. Damn me, but I'm game for a good time yet! A little off my feed, and under the weather; but game, you understand, game as hell!"
When the automobile, at last, was departing with the artist's guests; the two friends stood for a moment watching it up the road to the west, toward town. As the big car moved away, they saw Mrs. Taine lean forward to speak to the chauffeur while James Rutlidge, who was in the front seat, turned and shook his head as though in protest. The woman appeared to insist.
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